


Begin(e)n(d)ings

by juxtapose



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Immortal Scully
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-16
Updated: 2016-01-16
Packaged: 2018-05-14 08:22:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5736544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juxtapose/pseuds/juxtapose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a long journey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Begin(e)n(d)ings

**Author's Note:**

> So there's that theory that Scully is immortal, and apparently they're addressing that in the revival. Figured I'd get this out while I can.

It’s 2016.

She is 53 years old and peering up at a dark ceiling. Mulder’s breath is on her collarbone, steadier than one might imagine given all he’s seen. This is one of their decent nights—one in which his thoughts are not blockaded by traumatic half-memories, and her smile is genuine when his lips tickle her temple.

“You know,” he says teasingly, pressing a kiss to her exposed shoulder, “back in the day, we could go two or three rounds.”

She chuckles. “Are you suggesting we keep up the record?” Sitting up, she swings her left leg over his hips to straddle him over the sheets. She finds that instead of his usual suggestive smirk, his eyes widen.

“Dear God.”

His expression of panic sends a small shock down her spine. “Mulder? What is it?”

He props himself up on his shoulders. “I never thought I’d say this,” he iterates slowly, “but I think I’m getting too old for this.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “You heard it here first.”

He starts laughing, and she giggles along with him, but there is something like fear behind the jingling sounds she hopes he can’t pick up on. The computer chip behind her neck makes her blood burn as it flows.

 

It’s 2022.

It is quiet for many moments on her 60th birthday. She wrings her hands for a few seconds before folding them atop the x-rays strewn on the kitchen table. Doctors use their hands often. She hates moments in which they are forced to be idle.

Finally Mulder’s voice breaks through, foundations cracking:

“I knew it.” He runs both his hands through his salt-and-pepper hair, hard, tense lines in his forehead mixing with wrinkles.

She shakes her head. “Mulder, please don’t—“

“The second we met, I knew your life was over.” The rasp in his voice is indicative not of his age but of something else entirely—charred, broken emotion—though she can’t help but think how much the sound has changed. How much the glimmer that used to ignite in his eyes has altered in color and intensity over decades. “I wish you had known. I wish you’d walked out of that basement right after you shook my goddamn hand.”

“This isn’t anyone’s fault,” she protests, though he will not meet her eyes. “Well, it’s that cigarette-smoking bastard’s fault, but we can’t do anything about that now, can we?”

“So, what.” Mulder exhales a cacophonous laugh, the kind she did not miss from the years in which he watched his country’s government fail him day in and day out. “You die slowly or you’re not allowed to die at all? I won’t. I won’t let it happen.”

“But you have to,” she says, almost surprised by the frankness in her tone. “I have, for years. I didn’t want to tell—I didn’t know how to tell you. There’s data, Mulder. There are facts. Look at all of it.” She gestures to the spreadsheets, the photos, her own personal notes scrawled on scraps of paper. “I’ve been performing tests, collecting information, on my aging process since even before W—before our son was born.”

The almost-utterance of the name makes her breath hitch and his jaw clench. She clears her throat.

“…I’m aging slower. My body is not progressing the way it should. This chip, in removing my cancer, has prolonged my lifespan. By how much, I don’t know. But you’ve had a feeling for years now. Haven’t you?”

He nods, a slow drop of his chin, eyes fixed on the wooden table.

“I just…” she finishes, truthfully, because however many things she’s hidden from Mulder over the years she never could be openly dishonest with him. “I didn’t want to admit it myself.”

“What do we do?” His voice is that of a child—the believer rendered helpless in disbelief.

She leans over to take his hands. His tremble where hers are still. “We keep living,” she says, and while he takes it as a point of inspiration, of wisdom based on all they have been through together, she knows that it is her only option.

 

It’s 2035.

She is 70 years old and doesn’t look a day over 40. She cannot pinpoint exactly when her appearance stopped reflecting her age, but her outsides do not match her insides. Her smooth skin feels like a costume.

Fox Mulder is 74 and stalwart as ever, which is why, however pained she is, she is unsurprised as she cradles him in a Maryland wood surrounded by the sympathetic rustle of trees.

In name, their division of the FBI had been closed and reopened more times than any of them could count. But nomenclature had never meant much to Mulder. The X-Files, to him, are not defined by words on paper in manila folders. They are a concept. A journey. A sacrifice, a burden, and a quest. They are all those things for her, too. They kept up their own little investigations over the years. No matter how much they grew in their relationship and outside of it, they felt obligated to chase the monsters away from the human race as long as they were able. To uncover as much of the truth as they could--even if they sometimes forgot what that truth meant.

Until now.

They’d kept each other happy while they could. Kept the pain away while they could. But they both always knew that one day, after all that chasing, all that running, it had to stop.

“I can see her,” he says, delirium washing over his expression. “Samantha. Can you see her, Scully? Way up there?”

She follows his gaze, seeing only dim stars. “Yes, Mulder,” she whispers, “I can see her.”

“I spent so much time trying to find her.” His eyes are closed. His breathing is short, rapid. “To justify what happened. I guess now it’s her turn to find me.” He laughs a little. She files away the sound.

I am a doctor, she keeps repeating, a shaky mantra in her head. I am a doctor. Death is a natural process. Death happens to everyone. A biting, sharp whisper in the back of her mind adds, Except me.

She squeezes his right hand with her left, trying to blink away tears by observing her surroundings. Rural Maryland. This is where her life started. Where she had composed her thesis that a jaded, lonely man in a basement had read word-for-word. Where she had set the path which led her to this exact moment, where everything she knows is ending.

“Hey, Scully.” He lifts a bony hand to her face. Of course he would be nonchalant at a moment like this. She smiles through her tears and is acutely aware that it is the last time his skin will feel warm to the touch. “I love you.”

He never said it much. It was never necessary. It isn’t even necessary now, because everything she has ever needed to understand of Fox Mulder has always resided in how he looked at her, the pull of his arm around her shoulders, his inexplicable ability to simultaneously counter her balance and keep her steady.

“Scully?”

She bites her lip, blue eyes meeting his deep brown in between the flutter of his lashes. “Yes, Fox?”

Mulder winces at the use of his first name, and she brushes her fingers through his thinning hair playfully. Her eyesight is blurred by thick tears.

He says,“Thank you.”

Very gently, as if cradling a glass object, she braces his back with her left arm, leans down, and kisses his lips softly. Just once. It is the kind of kiss that friends share when they either, after decades, come together, or say goodbye to prepare for a lifetime apart. She wills that it encompasses everything. Lets him know that he is everything. Everything to her and everything she is.

His hand drops from her face. She takes a breath in time with his last. Branches rustle between silence.

Physically she is, as ever, a picture of health.

Inside, half of her soul has begun to rot away, forever intertwined with the unmoving body in her arms.

 

It’s 2105.

Technically, she is 140, but she doesn’t count in Earth years anymore.

She stands in a pew in the back of a small church. A traditional funeral. She has not attended one of these in many years. It seems fitting that this one brings her so far back to her past.

The priest’s voice echoes from the pulpit through a microphone, an ancient device which only Roman and Gothic establishments even bother to use anymore, for posterity, if anything. Everyone else just uses streaming feeds--even for Catholic Mass.

Father Michaels’ voice booms into the crowded room: “William Van De Camp was a man loved by all who knew him. His parents--” (The word stung. A hundred years and the word still stung.) --”raised a boy who became an exceptional brother, a supportive father, and a loving grandfather and great-grandfather. His passion for physical science, too, became his legacy. I have no doubt his students over many decades will never forget his honesty, his encouraging nature, or his enthusiasm for finding truth in everyday life.”

She does not know this man, but she hates him. She hates this quaint midwestern church adorned with holy figures she grew up memorizing and idolizing.

She hates that William Scully lived 104 years and had never come to know his real parents. Or that they had never come to know the remarkable man he’d become.

“And now we guide William to his place of rest.”

No one asks her who she is or why she’s there. At the burial site, a couple of the little ones peer up at her occasionally, a flicker of comprehension in their eyes. She sees a little bit of Mulder in their curiosity. It makes her ill.

When everyone has long gone, she places a smooth hand on the new stone. “I love you, my little boy,” she whispers.

She adds this to her list of Endings, and moves on.

 

It’s 2200.

At 236, she asks herself often why she is still here. New technologies have allowed for new discoveries on her part, and the solution to her plight is simple enough by now.

“How do I die?”

“You don’t.”

The fact is, she has been waiting. She has waited for centuries--slipping in and out of different identities, hair colors, countries, jobs as she went. Along the way her beliefs transformed themselves into those which only can be represented by the circular tattoo still bold on her body. Endings flow into beginnings flow into endings and so on. They have to. Or what are we living, breathing, thinking humans put on this planet for?

She’s kept tabs on her nation’s capital for just as long, among its changes, both good and bad. Partly she does it for Mulder, to keep his quest as steady as his heartbeat once was. And with all the latest technological advances in security, someone has to keep the FBI from hiding away too much, don’t they? She has mastered going unnoticed. Computer cloud files go missing, resurfacing on the front page of The New York Times via an anonymous tip a few months later. Some people think she’s a ghost. In a way, she is. She weaves her way in and out of the Bureau, knowing its ins and outs no matter how often the building itself has been burned down or refurbished or knocked over by forceful rebellion. The halls are hers. They always have been.

“The truth is out there,” is Mulder’s voice clear as day in her mind. For as long as she can, she’ll make sure it stays out there.

But mostly, she watches and waits for a time to stop waiting.

In 2200, Dana Scully stops waiting.

She does not know their names. They are both young, green. The girl is not shy, though. Her speech is as fiery as the read streaks in her dark hair, and she does not back down when he crosses his arms and tells her she’s being ridiculous. He is tall and lanky and blonde and they walk through the Bureau hallways bickering before the girl all but kicks open a door on the bottom floor labeled, “The X-Files.”

From a little ways off, she watches the pair. Sees in their expressions a spark she almost forgot had ever been ignited in her by a man called Fox Mulder. Finally, it is time to hand over the torch. Beginnings and endings and beginnings.

She has carried the synthetic blade in her pocket for decades, practicing the moment, the precision of it. It’s only a matter of cutting into skin. She’s done that all her life.

In the basement hallway where her world began, she cuts out a tiny piece of ancient alien technology from the back of her neck. She bleeds but she doesn’t feel pain. Each jab into her skin is a name she will soon put to a face again. Mulder. William. Emily. Melissa. Maggie. Walter. Monica. John. Bill. Charlie.

She goes home.

 

Special Agents Daryl Connor and Aisha Jones arrive on their first case as partners the next day. Brittle bones lie coiled around the grave of one Fox William Mulder.

“I don’t get it,” says Jones. “What makes this an X-File?”

Connor leans down, and among the rubble, retrieves a gold cross necklace. “Apparently there was a witness.”

It was said a woman had been here, in just the spot where the bones lay, eyes closed, peaceful, only moments before.


End file.
